By Rich Douglas, Executive Director, Human Capital Lab
“What’s the difference between leadership and management?” “Ha,” you might think, “that’s easy”:
- You manage things but lead people
- Anyone can learn to manage, but real leaders are born
- Leadership is getting people to do what they don’t want to do
Each of these dances around the concepts, but don’t truly hit the mark. Let’s take them in reverse order.
Leadership is getting people to do what they don’t want to do.
This one is close — often leaders must get their people to do undesired or unpleasant things. But this is just a piece of leadership—motivation, specifically.
Anyone can learn to manage, but real leaders are born.
This is the classic struggle between “trait theory” and “behavioral theory,” the question of whether people are born leaders or if leadership can be learned. Let’s cut through the noise, shall we? Leadership can be learned. After all, if leadership is based on the traits you’re born with, what’s the point of spending billions of dollars on leadership development programs every year? What’s with all that science and those books and magazine articles?
Do the traits we’re born with determine our leadership potential? No, but they influence it. Sure, being intelligent, brave and well-spoken are examples of traits that help you become a better leader. But they’re not mandatory. And how many leaders have you known who are too smart for their own good (“intelligent”), foolhardy (“brave”), and who are all talk and no action (“well spoken”)? Traits, undisciplined by leadership behaviors, can hurt your leadership ability.
You manage things but lead people.
This one is a classic. And it is dead wrong! The implication here is that management is a way to control objects, processes, projects and so forth. That part is right. But it’s also very true that people are managed. There is even a job title for people who do this: managers!
Leadership—the interpersonal kind—is considered one of the functions of being a manager. However, it’s a limited way of looking at leadership and management, as if we happily chug along managing our responsibilities until we need to pull out some leadership in dealing with our people. No, it’s much more fluid than that, a lot more challenging and a lot more fun.
All right, so what is a good distinction between leadership and management? As things unfold in this article, you’ll see why this one works:
- Management is keeping things on track.
- Leadership is going someplace new.
Let’s look at these two ideas and see how they’re different.
Management is keeping things on track. Back in the day, railroad engines ran on steam. In the early days, they got that steam by burning wood in a furnace that, in turn, heated water, which created the steam that powered the engine. In the cabin there was a conductor who drove the train, and a “fireman,” whose responsibility was to keep the furnace stoked with wood. He was also required to keep an eye on the pressure gauge, making sure it didn’t get too high (and explode) or too low (the train would slow down or even stop). The fireman managed the furnace/boiler to make sure it ran correctly and knew what adjustments to make to keep it that way.
Leadership is going someplace new. Let’s stay with trains for this one. Have you ever flown with Southern Pacific Airways? Or Baltimore-Ohio Air? Of course not. You can’t; they don’t exist. But trains used to be the fastest way for passengers to travel around the country. (Southern Pacific and Baltimore-Ohio were passenger train companies.) Not anymore, of course. And when passenger plane service was introduced, it was with new companies. Why not train companies? Why didn’t they introduce air travel so they could keep their valuable (and lucrative) passenger service? Because they saw themselves as train companies. But what if, instead, they had the foresight to imagine themselves in the people-moving business? It would have been natural for them to upgrade their technology (from trains to planes) to stay in the business of passenger travel. Instead, a lack of leadership—the ability to go someplace new—took them completely out of that business. (The passenger train business was completely wiped out, reduced to one publicly subsidized company—Amtrak—operating at a loss each year. And don’t even get me started on how the long-range bus companies suffered the same fate!) Leadership could have brought them into the future. Instead, a lack of leadership (and a key component of it: vision) took them out…for good.
So, you manage people and lead them on an interpersonal level. Organizations require strategic leadership to guide them into the future. Which are you (and will you be)? Hopefully, both!